Contents

A robot body, an imitation of the average human body made out of gleaming metal bone and dark muscle, like something out of an anatomy handbook. It seems to glow faintly from within. Its head is only vaguely human shaped, like a crash test dummy's, and lacks any sort of features. Hovering millimeters above that smooth visage is a collection of holographic points of light, arranged to form a simple emoticon to match the user’s feelings.

He wears a MCP-I suit, a skintight gray spacesuit with a bulbous helmet, the only part of the suit with an atmosphere. He carries a Laser Rifle with a couple of generators sticking out from it and what looks like an oversized tommygun with a camera attached. The tommygun is attached to a tripod with motors attached that seem to allow it to be aimed and fired remotely.

Leroux was a moderately successful psychiatrist, he was well educated in both academics and ethics. However, he started experiencing hallucinations. He began to see glimpses of eldritch forms, vaguely humanoid, that were controlling people like puppets, hanging over them like the circumpolar misericordes of death itself. Wherever he looked, he saw people manipulated like marionettes with what appeared to be glowing strings of bold text. Numbers in whispers like echoes that are too alien to be comprehended by humans haunted him constantly. The cruel irony of his circumstances tormented each day and each night, he began to withdraw from society. However, the specter that hovered over him did not allow that. He struggled, and for a while, he resisted. But it couldn't last forever and his luck eventually ran out. He still remembers the ghastly mechanical screech that consumed him, barely pronouncing a meaningless declaration of "one" and in the next instant, he was standing above a bloodied corpse with an equally bloodied knife in his hand.

Charles moves to orgyverse, onto the starting planet which has been renamed "Hera". He authors and publishes a book about his time in ARM, telling specifically of his involvement in the assault and defense of Hephaestus, and then about his time as PR admin. He paints ARM as a group of unruly and often inept but always well meaning rebels and himself as a sort of fatherly figure who watches their antics with mild exhaustion as he prepares slogans and posters to sway the public away from their mistakes. The book sells well but meets with variable reviews, ARM's public image becomes one less of heroics or villainy, and more of a bunch of ordinary people with often outrageous amounts of power attempting, semi-successfully to save humanity. Accepted, appreciated, even celebrated on certain holidays, but overall not very prominent in the public eye, at least on Hera and the slowly expanding confederation of planets around it.

Charles, after doing his best to slay the indifference of the public, sets out with a few old friends from Heph to try and unravel the mystery of The Sheep and other shared hallucinations. They form a rather fringe research institute which mainly studies the effects of various hallucinogenic drugs on volunteers, primarily xenospit. They document several shared hallucinatory beings, however, none of them are the sheep or the viscera man. After several years of research they finally conclude that these shared hallucinations are generally connected to large scale disasters. The final paper on the subject deems them to be "Echoes of a sort, the result of the shared resonance of individual emotions causing many disparate human brains to function as a crude origin/manipulator-like array. This creates transitory life forms that are only able to be seen by brains that are in a state which pushes them closer to origin configuration. The messages they deliver are vague for unknown reasons, however, they appear to have the ability to subvert causality, because occasionally we see 'specters' which have no instigating event in our timeline. Our only conclusion is that they somehow altered the chain of events that lead to the disaster and prevented it from happening."

Charles work is largely viewed as pseudo-science at best, but the emerging multiworld government on Hera, guided in secret by Miyamoto, quietly recruits his independent lab and funds further work. His research eventually culminates in a precognitive array consisting of hundreds of individuals and tanks of concentrated xenospit. The machine proves reliably predictive of the fact that something would happen, but deciphering exactly what the event would be has remained hit and miss depending on how cryptic the clues are. However, somewhat frighteningly, the number of observed "Specters" continues to grow.